SBN

A Word About Tracking On This Site

Since I just railed against Congress for being a bit two-faced about privacy I thought some rud.is site disclosure would be in order.

At present, third-party tracking is limited to:

  • Something in my WordPress configuration adding a DNS pre-fetch for fonts.googleapis.com. There are a few more other DNS pre-fetches that I’m also going to try to eradicate (but that aren’t showing up in my uBlock Origin likely to to /etc/hosts blocks);
  • Gravatar (which displays logos near comment author names). I’m torn on this one but Gravatar is owned by Automattic (who owns WordPress). See next bullet on that;
  • WordPress. Vain site stats tracking, JetPack uptime warnings and some other WordPress pings happen (including some automatic short-linking) as well as the previous bullet bits. I’m not likely going to do the site surgery necessary to stop this but you have full disclosure and can easily avoid pings to those sites via uBlock Origin site-specific rules;
  • SendPulse; I’m running an experiment on user behaviours when it comes to authorizing web notifications (and I just kinda ruined said experiment). I’ll be disabling it later this year (after a full year of it being on so I can have more than just a few sentences to say).

The above came from an in-browser uBlock Origin report.

I ran a splashr::render_har() — which is how I measured things for the Congressional privacy post — on one of my pages and this is the result:

tld                 n
1 rud.is           67
2 wp.com           21
3 gravatar.com      6
4 wordpress.com     3
5 w.org             3
6 sendpulse.com     2

Props on WordPress capturing w.org! I’m still ticked Microsoft stole bob.com from me ages ago.

As you can see, most resources load from my site and none come from Twitter, Facebook or Google Plus.

I run WordPress for a ton of reasons too long to go into for this post, so I’m likely not going to change anything about that list (apart from the DNS pre-fetching).

Hopefully that will abate any concerns visitors might have, especially after reading the post about Congress.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from rud.is authored by hrbrmstr. Read the original post at: https://rud.is/b/2018/04/15/a-word-about-tracking-on-this-site/